The present study investigated whether negative affect mediated the relationship between neuroticism and creative idea selection performance, and whether self-compassion moderated this pathway. A sample of 407 participants completed a trait neuroticism scale, engaged in either a self-compassion or control writing task, and then completed a creative idea selection task. While neuroticism significantly predicted higher levels of negative affect, the mediation analysis showed that negative affect did not significantly mediate the relationship between neuroticism and creative idea selection. The self-compassion intervention successfully reduced negative affect overall but did not moderate the relationship between neuroticism and negative affect, nor the indirect effect on idea selection. Moderated mediation was also not supported, as the conditional indirect effects across groups did not significantly differ. Exploratory analyses confirmed that the relationship between negative affect and creative performance was confounded by gender, with females outperforming males on the selection task. These findings highlight that while emotional and personality factors shape creativity, their effects are complex and context-sensitive, pointing to the need for more targeted emotion regulation interventions in creative performance research.